Yaa Gyasi

My name is inscribed inside the front cover, but the pages are clear- great collectible copy!

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

A Novel

"A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice"--

Transcendent Kingdom

37ad0395-cef4-41a9-afe2-164b5e8c9f65-1

Megha Majumdar

Name inscribed on inside cover; otherwise, pages are clear. I loved this book- a fascinating study on the role of social media in the criminal justice system!

"After a fiery attack on a train leaves 104 people dead, the fates of three people become inextricably entangled. Jivan, a bright, striving woman from the slums looking for a way out of poverty, is wrongly accused of planning the attack because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir, a slippery gym teacher from Jivan's former high school, has hitched his aspirations to a rising right wing party, and his own ascent becomes increasingly linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely, a spirited, impoverished, relentlessly optimistic hjira, who harbors dreams of becoming a Bollywood star, can provide the alibi that would set Jivan free--but her appearance in court will have unexpected consequences that will change the course of all of their lives. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths--A Burning is a debut novel of exceptional power and urgency, haunting and beautiful, brutal, vibrant, impossible to forget"--

A Burning

b1651131-940e-42f9-9172-8c63a116ebf2-1

Ann Patchett

Nice quality pages, no marks! Just some wear/fading on the cover edges (pictured)

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, State of Wonder presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity. As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy.

State of Wonder

25d4035f-f357-4496-8d87-62eb6b000159-1

Justine Harrington

Received as a gift and never read- perfect condition!

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Guide to Get Out of Your Head and into Your Heart

Homecoming

7e3f3351-64d3-4adc-9f16-789fa44734e5-0

Clive Barker

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, one day finds herself on the edge of a foreign world that is populated by strange creatures, and her life is forever changed.

Abarat

1d663448-7266-4ae8-a77f-0c8c28ea962e-1

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

20ecbf8f-5da7-46be-b7cb-0147b1146342-1

Cammie McGovern

A couple of dogeared pages and slight bend in dust jacket 

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park in this beautifully written, incredibly honest, and emotionally poignant novel. Cammie McGovern's insightful young adult debut is a heartfelt and heartbreaking story about how we can all feel lost until we find someone who loves us because of our faults, not in spite of them. Born with cerebral palsy, Amy can't walk without a walker, talk without a voice box, or even fully control her facial expressions. Plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew is consumed with repeated thoughts, neurotic rituals, and crippling fear. Both in desperate need of someone to help them reach out to the world, Amy and Matthew are more alike than either ever realized. When Amy decides to hire student aides to help her in her senior year at Coral Hills High School, these two teens are thrust into each other's lives. As they begin to spend time with each other, what started as a blossoming friendship eventually grows into something neither expected.

Say What You Will

3e49b261-5c93-411a-9a6e-8ff16a15088a-1

Christopher Paolini

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

Book I

In Alagaèesia, a fifteen-year-old boy of unknown lineage called Eragon finds a mysterious stone that weaves his life into an intricate tapestry of destiny, magic, and power, peopled with dragons, elves, and monsters.

Eragon

084c770f-f426-4fec-84af-cfb5c6a2c3ce-1

Helen Moon

Slight wrinkle on one page (pictured), but the cover is flawless. Helpful resource for first-time parents!

A Plan That Creates Calm, Confident Parents and a Happy, Secure Baby

From baby nurse to the stars, a step-by-step plan to managing sleep and feeding issues to survive--and enjoy--the first six weeks of your newborn baby's life.

Have you ever wondered why celebrities look so rested in such a short time after giving birth? The answer: baby specialists like Helen Moon. A baby specialist and professional nanny for the past 25 years, Helen has worked closely with hundreds of families, including some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Helen knows that the first six weeks of a baby's life--when parents tend to be nervous, siblings are needy, and new babies need immediate and constant attention--has a huge impact on the entire family. Getting a baby on a sleeping and eating schedule is an achievable dream, and it's not a mystery. Helen's step-by-step plan shows new parents exactly how to integrate their baby into the family so that she will be able to sleep when she's tired, eat when she's hungry, and calm herself when she's fussy--self-regulating skills that will enable her to thrive for the rest of her life.

Assured that their babies are secure and happy, parents can confidently enjoy this most precious time of their baby's life, trusting their own instincts, and--most importantly--sleeping through the night themselves!

Cherish the First Six Weeks

06a3bf72-051c-4eb7-8083-ad34f5d41728-1

Sarah Suk

Perfect copy; just finished reading it and happy to pass it along to the next reader!

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Perfect for fans of They Both Die at the End and You've Reached Sam, this gripping, atmospheric YA novel follows a teen with a mysterious condition that transports her to the past when she smells certain scents linked to specific memories. Seventeen-year-old Aimee Roh has Sensory Time Warp Syndrome, a rare condition that causes her to time travel to a moment in her life when she smells something linked to that memory. Her dad is convinced she'll simply grow out of it if she tries hard enough, but Aimee's fear of vanishing at random has kept her from living a normal life. When Aimee disappears for nine hours into a memory of her estranged mom--a moment Aimee has never remembered before--she becomes distraught. Not only was this her longest disappearance yet, but the memory doesn't match up with the story of how her mom left--at least, not the version she's always heard from her dad. Desperate for answers, Aimee travels to Korea, where she unravels the mystery of her memories, the truth about her mother, and the reason she keeps returning to certain moments in her life. Along the way, she realizes she'll need to reconcile her past in order to save her present. From acclaimed author Sarah Suk comes an aching, powerful exploration of memory, grief, and the painful silences we must overcome to discover our truest selves.

The Space Between Here and Now

f302f41c-b7e8-45d9-80c1-fe731d7528e4-1

Thomas J. Cottle

Some pages have underlined passages; cover has been reinforced with tape. Good reading copy for any high school educator!

Adolescent Consciousness in a Culture of Distraction

In Mind Fields, Thomas J. Cottle argues that the period known as adolescence is essentially a social construct influenced greatly by popular culture. To understand young people, therefore, is to recognize how the very consciousness of adolescents is shaped by a culture, dominated by the entertainment industry, and the power of television and the computer, constantly urging them to turn away from the normal evolution of their personal and social lives. In this fundamentally distracting environment, young people explore their consciousness, sharing it with others, as well as form their sense of identity, all the while having these most inner experiences affected as much by the culture as by their own temperaments and personalities. It is the culture that determines the forms of recognition and independence, as well as intimacy and attachment that adolescents must learn. In the end, the author argues for the value of self-reflection as a critical ingredient of identity formation and a fundamental antidote to distracting cultural influences.

Mind Fields

950082f8-f1f9-4c48-b693-54e1350026d1-0

Colum McCann

Purchased used; you can add your name to the inside cover to keep the lineage of this book going!

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal. Praise for Let the Great World Spin “This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it’s a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There’s so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”—Dave Eggers “Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families—the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.”—USA Today “The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air.”—Esquire “Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCann’s marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down.”—The Seattle Times “Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCann’s heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow.”—Entertainment Weekly “An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Let the Great World Spin

55077da2-a27d-4588-9584-f3a700417856-1

Edith Grossman

Gabriel García Márquez

Small wrinkle in the back dust jacket (pictured); hard cover volume is flawless!

Having decided to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by spending the night with a young virgin, an old man falls deeply in love for the first time in his life when he spots the girl at a local brothel. 250,000 first printing.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

cf30d161-e8f5-4c9d-9c23-2df9785619c8-1

Slight bend on the front cover, but the pages are perfect. 

Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years, on the day of her husband's funeral. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Love in the Time of Cholera

7acf0259-3d61-4dcc-a99d-eb847dc50298-1

Margaret Atwood

Just missing dust jacket; flawless pages! 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. InThe Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious.

The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. EntitledThe Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s,The Blind Assassinis a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be--but, in fact, much more.

The Blind Assassinproves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. LikeThe Handmaid's Tale, it is destined to become a classic.

The Blind Assassin

1d75ad9a-933d-400d-9ae7-a10b662a0f7f-1

Julia Spencer-Fleming

Only marks are shown on inside front cover (copy has a birthday gift inscription); no other marked pages, perfect for reading!

A Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mystery

Saturday, November 14, 5:00 A.M.

In the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill, an old lumberman sits in the dark with his gun across his knees. Not far away, an unemployed logger sleeps off his bender from the night before. The owner of the town's last paper mill tosses in his bed. And a young woman, one of three heirs to the 250,000-acre Great Camp, wakes alone in darkness, bound and gagged.

Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne wants nothing more than a quiet day of hunting in the mountains on his fiftieth birthday. His wife needs to have the town's new luxury resort ready for its gala opening night. The Reverend Clare Fergusson expects to spend the day getting St. Alban's Church ready for the bishop's annual visit. Her long-distance suitor from New York expects some answers about their relationship during his weekend in town.

In Millers Kill, where everyone knows everyone and all are part of an interconnected web of blood or acquaintance, one person's troubles have a way of ensnaring others. What begins as a simple case of a woman lost in the woods leads to a tangle of revenge, blackmail, assault, kidnapping, and murder. As the hours tick by, Russ and Clare struggle to make sense of their town's plunge into chaos---and their own chaotic emotions.

Something terrible waits in the ice-rimed mountains cradling Millers Kill. Something that won't be content with just one death---or two. . .

In To Darkness and To Death, Julia Spencer-Fleming continues her moving story of the way a small town, as well as a great city, can harbor evil, and the struggle of two honest people to deal with the ever-present threat of their feelings for one another.

To Darkness and to Death

0d65490c-6f10-4169-9bbe-c4f5ee4af5af-1

Stuart Neville

Fegan has been a “hard man,” an IRA killer in northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by twelve ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven other of his innocent victims. In order to appease them, he’s going to have to kill the men who gave him orders.

“The best first novel I’ve read in years...It’s a flat-out terror trip.”—James Ellroy “Not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times.”—John Connolly “The Ghosts of Belfast is the book when the world finally sits up and goes WOW, the Irish really have taken over the world of crime writing. Stuart Neville is Ireland’s answer to Henning Mankell.”—Ken Bruen “Sure to garner attention and stir lively pub discussions.”—Library Journal “Neville’s debut novel is tragic, violent, exciting, plausible, and compelling. . . . The Ghosts of Belfast is dark, powerful, insightful, and hard to put down.”—Booklist “Neville’s debut is as unrelenting as Fegan’s ghosts, pulling no punches as it describes the brutality of Ireland’s 'troubles' and the crime that has followed, as violent men find new outlets for their skills. Sharp prose places readers in this pitiless place and holds them there. Harsh and unrelenting crime fiction, masterfully done.”—Kirkus “[Stuart] Neville has the talent to believably blend the tropes of the crime novel and those of a horror, in the process creating a page-turning thriller akin to a collaboration between John Connolly and Stephen King. . . [The Ghosts of Belfast] is a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.”—Sunday Independent (Ireland) Fegan has been a “hard man,” an IRA killer in northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by twelve ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven other of his innocent victims. In order to appease them, he’s going to have to kill the men who gave him orders. As he’s working his way down the list he encounters a woman who may offer him redemption; she has borne a child to an RUC officer and is an outsider too. Now he has given Fate—and his quarry—a hostage. Is this Fegan’s ultimate mistake? Stuart Neville is a partner in a multimedia design business based in Armagh, northern Ireland. This novel, also known as The Twelve in the UK and Ireland, is the first in a series. From the Hardcover edition.

Ghosts of Belfast

4fbdcae2-cd96-445d-a1f7-b63c61f6efd3-1

Jacqueline Woodson

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "A spectacular novel that only this legend can pull off." -Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, in The Atlantic "An exquisite tale of family legacy….The power and poetry of Woodson’s writing conjures up Toni Morrison." – People "In less than 200 sparsely filled pages, this book manages to encompass issues of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood and loss….With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen — even further into the ranks of great literature." – NPR "This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters." –Tayari Jones, bestselling author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE, in O Magazine An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes and explores their histories – reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 -- and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming. Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody's family – reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 -- to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Red at the Bone

70eba080-1db5-48cc-8ed3-379aed8e4733-1

Inge Bell

Second edition (1991); Used copy in great shape; highlighting/underlining on some pages. Great reference for someone worried about how to navigate the shift to college for the first time!

"This Book Is Not Required" is an intellectual, emotional, & spiritual survival manual for undergraduates. It covers such topics as: Grades, can you perform without the pressure?; how to support & receive support from your professors; why everybody hates to write; the truth about falling in & out of love; trouble with parents; how to deal with your overly sensitive ego; & the myth of the 60s & the myth of the "me" generation.

This Book Is Not Required

636212be-db00-414e-b171-53937ff49852-0

Mark Twain

Charles Dudley Warner

Louis J. Budd

Like new condition, no marks or creases. Never read.

A Tale of Today

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their own time in a work which endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Gilded Age

50171c58-863f-4044-8c3a-100e3b7c2dfd-1

Ann Beattie

Great vintage copy! No highlighting or page markings aside from the stamp on the inside front cover. Rare find!

This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.

Chilly Scenes of Winter

38da834c-5902-4cfe-a904-884ae284c645-0

Philippa Gregory

A period drama like no other, written in an engaging way! Condition is perfect except for a slight crease on the spine (pictured). Cover has some shimmery details.

The #1 New York Times bestseller from “the queen of royal fiction” (USA TODAY) Philippa Gregory is a rich, compelling novel of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue surrounding the Tudor court of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the infamous Boleyn family. When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of the handsome and charming Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family’s ambitious plots as the king’s interest begins to wane, and soon she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. With her own destiny suddenly unknown, Mary realizes that she must defy her family and take fate into her own hands. With more than one million copies in print and adapted for the big screen, The Other Boleyn Girl is a riveting historical drama. It brings to light a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe, and survived a treacherous political landscape by following her heart.

The Other Boleyn Girl

85926c51-6b2b-4fa3-9b33-67446e8ce70f-1

Paul Brooks

Some annotations and dog-eared pages, but the cover is in perfect condition- a great resource for any scholar of Thoreau or Emerson!

History

American Intellectuals and Their Timeless Ideas

An armchair visit to the year 1846 in Concord, Massachusetts showing what life was like for Thoreau, Emerson and their contemporaries. Reflects upon issues of the time including the Mexican-American War, the spread of slavery, and the industrial revolution. Book was originally published by Applewood Books.

The People of Concord

f96e5379-1a35-41cf-9edf-263ef2c23c89-1

Thomas C. Foster

In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock the  hidden truths between the lines of fiction.

A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface—a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character—and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock those hidden truths, and to discover a world where a road leads to a quest; a shared meal may signify a communion; and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just rain. Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

Browse by categories